THROUGH THE MAGIC DOOR

by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

I.

I care not how humble your bookshelf may be, nor how lowly the room
which it adorns. Close the door of that room behind you, shut off
with it all the cares of the outer world, plunge back into the
soothing company of the great dead, and then you are through the
magic portal into that fair land whither worry and vexation can
follow you no more. You have left all that is vulgar and all that is
sordid behind you. There stand your noble, silent comrades, waiting
in their ranks. Pass your eye down their files. Choose your man.
And then you have but to hold up your hand to him and away you go
together into dreamland. Surely there would be something eerie about
a line of books were it not that familiarity has deadened our sense
of it. Each is a mummified soul embalmed in cere-cloth and natron
of leather and printer's ink. Each cover of a true book enfolds the
concentrated essence of a man. The personalities of the writers have
faded into the thinnest shadows, as their bodies into impalpable
dust, yet here are their very spirits at your command.

It is our familiarity also which has lessened our perception of the
miraculous good fortune which we enjoy. Let us suppose that we were
suddenly to learn that Shakespeare had returned to earth, and that
he would favour any of us with an hour of his wit and his fancy. How
eagerly we would seek him out! And yet we have him--the very best of
him--at our elbows from week to week, and hardly trouble ourselves
to put out our hands to beckon him down. No matter what mood a man
may be in, when once he has passed through the magic door he can
summon the world's greatest to sympathize with him in it. If he be
thoughtful, here are the kings of thought. If he be dreamy, here
are the masters of fancy. Or is it amusement that he lacks? He can
signal to any one of the world's great story-tellers, and out comes
the dead man and holds him enthralled by the hour. The dead are such
good company that one may come to think too little of the living.
It is a real and a pressing danger with many of us, that we should
never find our own thoughts and our own souls, but be ever obsessed
by the dead. Yet second-hand romance and second-hand emotion are
surely better than the dull, soul-killing monotony which life brings
to most of the human race. But best of all when the dead man's
wisdom and strength in the living of our own strenuous days.

Come through the magic door with me, and sit here on the green
settee, where you can see the old oak case with its untidy lines of
volumes. Smoking is not forbidden. Would you care to hear me talk of
them? Well, I ask nothing better, for there is no volume there which
is not a dear, personal friend, and what can a man talk of more
pleasantly than that? The other books are over yonder, but these are
my own favourites--the ones I care to re-read and to have near my
elbow. There is not a tattered cover which does not bring its mellow
memories to me.

Some of them represent those little sacrifices which make a
possession dearer. You see the line of old, brown volumes at the
bottom? Every one of those represents a lunch. They were bought in
my student days, when times were not too affluent. Threepence was
my modest allowance for my midday sandwich and glass of beer; but,
as luck would have it, my way to the classes led past the most
fascinating bookshop in the world. Outside the door of it stood a
large tub filled with an ever-changing litter of tattered books,
with a card above which announced that any volume therein could be
purchased for the identical sum which I carried in my pocket. As I
approached it a combat ever raged betwixt the hunger of a youthful
body and that of an inquiring and omnivorous mind. Five times out of
six the animal won. But when the mental prevailed, then there was an
entrancing five minutes' digging among out-of-date almanacs, volumes
of Scotch theology, and tables of logarithms, until one found
something which made it all worth while. If you will look over these
titles, you will see that I did not do so very badly. Four volumes
of Gordon's "Tacitus" (life is too short to read originals, so
long as there are good translations), Sir William Temple's Essays,
Addison's works, Swift's "Tale of a Tub," Clarendon's "History,"
"Gil Blas," Buckingham's Poems, Churchill's Poems, "Life of
Bacon"--not so bad for the old threepenny tub.

They were not always in such plebeian company. Look at the thickness
of the rich leather, and the richness of the dim gold lettering.
Once they adorned the shelves of some noble library, and even among
the odd almanacs and the sermons they bore the traces of their
former greatness, like the faded silk dress of the reduced
gentlewoman, a present pathos but a glory of the past.

Reading is made too easy nowadays, with cheap paper editions and
free libraries. A man does not appreciate at its full worth the
thing that comes to him without effort. Who now ever gets the thrill
which Carlyle felt when he hurried home with the six volumes of
Gibbon's "History" under his arm, his mind just starving for want
of food, to devour them at the rate of one a day? A book should be
your very own before you can really get the taste of it, and unless
you have worked for it, you will never have the true inward pride
of possession.

If I had to choose the one book out of all that line from which I
have had most pleasure and most profit, I should point to yonder
stained copy of Macaulay's "Essays." It seems entwined into my whole
life as I look backwards. It was my comrade in my student days, it
has been with me on the sweltering Gold Coast, and it formed part
of my humble kit when I went a-whaling in the Arctic. Honest Scotch
harpooners have addled their brains over it, and you may still see
the grease stains where the second engineer grappled with Frederick
the Great. Tattered and dirty and worn, no gilt-edged morocco-bound
volume could ever take its place for me.

What a noble gateway this book forms through which one may approach
the study either of letters or of history! Milton, Machiavelli,
Hallam, Southey, Bunyan, Byron, Johnson, Pitt, Hampden, Clive,
Hastings, Chatham--what nuclei for thought! With a good grip of each
how pleasant and easy to fill in all that lies between! The short,
vivid sentences, the broad sweep of allusion, the exact detail, they
all throw a glamour round the subject and should make the least
studious of readers desire to go further. If Macaulay's hand cannot
lead a man upon those pleasant paths, then, indeed, he may give up
all hope of ever finding them.

When I was a senior schoolboy this book--not this very volume, for
it had an even more tattered predecessor--opened up a new world to
me. History had been a lesson and abhorrent. Suddenly the task and
the drudgery became an incursion into an enchanted land, a land of
colour and beauty, with a kind, wise guide to point the path. In
that great style of his I loved even the faults--indeed, now that
I come to think of it, it was the faults which I loved best. No
sentence could be too stiff with rich embroidery, and no antithesis
too flowery. It pleased me to read that "a universal shout of
laughter from the Tagus to the Vistula informed the Pope that the
days of the crusades were past," and I was delighted to learn that
"Lady Jerningham kept a vase in which people placed foolish verses,
and Mr. Dash wrote verses which were fit to be placed in Lady
Jerningham's vase." Those were the kind of sentences which used to
fill me with a vague but enduring pleasure, like chords which linger
in the musician's ear. A man likes a plainer literary diet as he
grows older, but still as I glance over the Essays I am filled with
admiration and wonder at the alternate power of handling a great
subject, and of adorning it by delightful detail--just a bold sweep
of the brush, and then the most delicate stippling. As he leads you
down the path, he for ever indicates the alluring side-tracks which
branch away from it. An admirable, if somewhat old-fashioned,
literary and historical education night be effected by working
through every book which is alluded to in the Essays. I should be
curious, however, to know the exact age of the youth when he came
to the end of his studies.

I wish Macaulay had written a historical novel. I am convinced that
it would have been a great one. I do not know if he had the power
of drawing an imaginary character, but he certainly had the gift
of reconstructing a dead celebrity to a remarkable degree. Look
at the simple half-paragraph in which he gives us Johnson and his
atmosphere. Was ever a more definite picture given in a shorter
space--

"As we close it, the club-room is before us, and the table
on which stand the omelet for Nugent, and the lemons for
Johnson. There are assembled those heads which live for ever
on the canvas of Reynolds. There are the spectacles of Burke,
and the tall thin form of Langton, the courtly sneer of
Beauclerk and the beaming smile of Garrick, Gibbon tapping
his snuff-box, and Sir Joshua with his trumpet in his ear.
In the foreground is that strange figure which is as familiar
to us as the figures of those among whom we have been brought
up--the gigantic body, the huge massy face, seamed with the
scars of disease, the brown coat, the black worsted stockings,
the grey wig with the scorched foretop, the dirty hands, the
nails bitten and pared to the quick. We see the eyes and mouth
moving with convulsive twitches; we see the heavy form rolling;
we hear it puffing, and then comes the 'Why, sir!' and the
'What then, sir?' and the 'No, sir!' and the 'You don't see
your way through the question, sir!'"

It is etched into your memory for ever.

I can remember that when I visited London at the age of sixteen the
first thing I did after housing my luggage was to make a pilgrimage
to Macaulay's grave, where he lies in Westminster Abbey, just under
the shadow of Addison, and amid the dust of the poets whom he had
loved so well. It was the one great object of interest which London
held for me. And so it might well be, when I think of all I owe
him. It is not merely the knowledge and the stimulation of fresh
interests, but it is the charming gentlemanly tone, the broad,
liberal outlook, the general absence of bigotry and of prejudice.
My judgment now confirms all that I felt for him then.

My four-volume edition of the History stands, as you see, to the
right of the Essays. Do you recollect the third chapter of that
work--the one which reconstructs the England of the seventeenth
century? It has always seemed to me the very high-water mark of
Macaulay's powers, with its marvellous mixture of precise fact
and romantic phrasing. The population of towns, the statistics of
commerce, the prosaic facts of life are all transmuted into wonder
and interest by the handling of the master. You feel that he could
have cast a glamour over the multiplication table had he set himself
to do so. Take a single concrete example of what I mean. The fact
that a Londoner in the country, or a countryman in London, felt
equally out of place in those days of difficult travel, would seem
to hardly require stating, and to afford no opportunity of leaving
a strong impression upon the reader's mind. See what Macaulay makes
of it, though it is no more than a hundred other paragraphs which
discuss a hundred various points--

"A cockney in a rural village was stared at as much as if he
had intruded into a kraal of Hottentots. On the other hand,
when the lord of a Lincolnshire or Shropshire manor appeared
in Fleet Street, he was as easily distinguished from the
resident population as a Turk or a Lascar. His dress, his gait,
his accent, the manner in which he gazed at the shops, stumbled
into gutters, ran against the porters, and stood under the
waterspouts, marked him out as an excellent subject for the
operations of swindlers and banterers. Bullies jostled him into
the kennel, Hackney coachmen splashed him from head to foot,
thieves explored with perfect security the huge pockets of his
horseman's coat, while he stood entranced by the splendour of
the Lord Mayor's Show. Money-droppers, sore from the cart's
tail, introduced themselves to him, and appeared to him the
most honest friendly gentlemen that he had ever seen. Painted
women, the refuse of Lewkner Lane and Whetstone Park, passed
themselves on him for countesses and maids of honour. If he
asked his way to St. James', his informants sent him to Mile
End. If he went into a shop, he was instantly discerned to be
a fit purchaser of everything that nobody else would buy, of
second-hand embroidery, copper rings, and watches that would
not go. If he rambled into any fashionable coffee-house, he
became a mark for the insolent derision of fops, and the grave
waggery of Templars. Enraged and mortified, he soon returned
to his mansion, and there, in the homage of his tenants and
the conversation of his boon companions, found consolation for
the vexations and humiliations which he had undergone. There
he was once more a great man, and saw nothing above himself
except when at the assizes he took his seat on the bench near
the Judge, or when at the muster of the militia he saluted the
Lord Lieutenant."

On the whole, I should put this detached chapter of description at
the very head of his Essays, though it happens to occur in another
volume. The History as a whole does not, as it seems to me, reach
the same level as the shorter articles. One cannot but feel that it
is a brilliant piece of special pleading from a fervid Whig, and
that there must be more to be said for the other side than is there
set forth. Some of the Essays are tinged also, no doubt, by his own
political and religious limitations. The best are those which get
right away into the broad fields of literature and philosophy.
Johnson, Walpole, Madame D'Arblay, Addison, and the two great Indian
ones, Clive and Warren Hastings, are my own favourites. Frederick
the Great, too, must surely stand in the first rank. Only one would
I wish to eliminate. It is the diabolically clever criticism upon
Montgomery. One would have wished to think that Macaulay's heart was
too kind, and his soul too gentle, to pen so bitter an attack. Bad
work will sink of its own weight. It is not necessary to souse the
author as well. One would think more highly of the man if he had not
done that savage bit of work.

I don't know why talking of Macaulay always makes me think of Scott,
whose books in a faded, olive-backed line, have a shelf, you see, of
their own. Perhaps it is that they both had so great an influence,
and woke such admiration in me. Or perhaps it is the real similarity
in the minds and characters of the two men. You don't see it, you
say? Well, just think of Scott's "Border Ballads," and then of
Macaulay's "Lays." The machines must be alike, when the products are
so similar. Each was the only man who could possibly have written
the poems of the other. What swing and dash in both of them! What
a love of all that is and noble and martial! So simple, and yet so
strong. But there are minds on which strength and simplicity are
thrown away. They think that unless a thing is obscure it must be
superficial, whereas it is often the shallow stream which is turbid,
and the deep which is clear. Do you remember the fatuous criticism
of Matthew Arnold upon the glorious "Lays," where he calls out "is
this poetry?" after quoting--

"And how can man die better
Than facing fearful odds
For the ashes of his fathers
And the Temples of his Gods?"

In trying to show that Macaulay had not the poetic sense he was
really showing that he himself had not the dramatic sense. The
baldness of the idea and of the language had evidently offended him.
But this is exactly where the true merit lies. Macaulay is giving
the rough, blunt words with which a simple-minded soldier appeals
to two comrades to help him in a deed of valour. Any high-flown
sentiment would have been absolutely out of character. The lines
are, I think, taken with their context, admirable ballad poetry, and
have just the dramatic quality and sense which a ballad poet must
have. That opinion of Arnold's shook my faith in his judgment, and
yet I would forgive a good deal to the man who wrote--

"One more charge and then be dumb,
When the forts of Folly fall,
May the victors when they come
Find my body near the wall."

Not a bad verse that for one's life aspiration.

This is one of the things which human society has not yet
understood--the value of a noble, inspiriting text. When it does
we shall meet them everywhere engraved on appropriate places, and
our progress through the streets will be brightened and ennobled
by one continual series of beautiful mental impulses and images,
reflected into our souls from the printed thoughts which meet our
eyes. To think that we should walk with empty, listless minds while
all this splendid material is running to waste. I do not mean mere
Scriptural texts, for they do not bear the same meaning to all,
though what human creature can fail to be spurred onwards by "Work
while it is day, for the night cometh when no man can work." But I
mean those beautiful thoughts--who can say that they are uninspired
thoughts?--which may be gathered from a hundred authors to match a
hundred uses. A fine thought in fine language is a most precious
jewel, and should not be hid away, but be exposed for use and
ornament. To take the nearest example, there is a horse-trough across
the road from my house, a plain stone trough, and no man could pass
it with any feelings save vague discontent at its ugliness. But
suppose that on its front slab you print the verse of Coleridge--

"He prayeth best who loveth best
All things, both great and small
For the dear Lord who fashioned him
He knows and loveth all."

I fear I may misquote, for I have not "The Ancient Mariner" at my
elbow, but even as it stands does it not elevate the horse-trough?
We all do this, I suppose, in a small way for ourselves. There
are few men who have not some chosen quotations printed on their
study mantelpieces, or, better still, in their hearts. Carlyle's
transcription of "Rest! Rest! Shall I not have all Eternity to rest
in!" is a pretty good spur to a weary man. But what we need is a
more general application of the same thing for public and not for
private use, until people understand that a graven thought is as
beautiful an ornament as any graven image, striking through the eye
right deep down into the soul.

However, all this has nothing to do with Macaulay's glorious lays,
save that when you want some flowers of manliness and patriotism you
can pluck quite a bouquet out of those. I had the good fortune to
learn the Lay of Horatius off by heart when I was a child, and it
stamped itself on my plastic mind, so that even now I can reel off
almost the whole of it. Goldsmith said that in conversation he was
like the man who had a thousand pounds in the bank, but could not
compete with the man who had an actual sixpence in his pocket. So
the ballad that you bear in your mind outweighs the whole bookshelf
which waits for reference. But I want you now to move your eye a
little farther down the shelf to the line of olive-green volumes.
That is my edition of Scott. But surely I must give you a little
breathing space before I venture upon them.

II.

It is a great thing to start life with a small number of really good
books which are your very own. You may not appreciate them at first.
You may pine for your novel of crude and unadulterated adventure.
You may, and will, give it the preference when you can. But the dull
days come, and the rainy days come, and always you are driven to
fill up the chinks of your reading with the worthy books which wait
so patiently for your notice. And then suddenly, on a day which
marks an epoch in your life, you understand the difference. You see,
like a flash, how the one stands for nothing, and the other for
literature. From that day onwards you may return to your crudities,
but at least you do so with some standard of comparison in your
mind. You can never be the same as you were before. Then gradually
the good thing becomes more dear to you; it builds itself up with
your growing mind; it becomes a part of your better self, and so, at
last, you can look, as I do now, at the old covers and love them for
all that they have meant in the past. Yes, it was the olive-green
line of Scott's novels which started me on to rhapsody. They were
the first books I ever owned--long, long before I could appreciate
or even understand them. But at last I realized what a treasure they
were. In my boyhood I read them by surreptitious candle-ends in the
dead of the night, when the sense of crime added a new zest to the
story. Perhaps you have observed that my "Ivanhoe" is of a different
edition from the others. The first copy was left in the grass by the
side of a stream, fell into the water, and was eventually picked up
three days later, swollen and decomposed, upon a mud-bank. I think I
may say, however, that I had worn it out before I lost it. Indeed,
it was perhaps as well that it was some years before it was
replaced, for my instinct was always to read it again instead of
breaking fresh ground.

I remember the late James Payn telling the anecdote that he and two
literary friends agreed to write down what scene in fiction they
thought the most dramatic, and that on examining the papers it was
found that all three had chosen the same. It was the moment when
the unknown knight, at Ashby-de-la-Zouch, riding past the pavilions
of the lesser men, strikes with the sharp end of his lance, in a
challenge to mortal combat, the shield of the formidable Templar.
It was, indeed, a splendid moment! What matter that no Templar was
allowed by the rules of his Order to take part in so secular and
frivolous an affair as a tournament? It is the privilege of great
masters to make things so, and it is a churlish thing to gainsay
it. Was it not Wendell Holmes who described the prosaic man, who
enters a drawing-room with a couple of facts, like ill-conditioned
bull-dogs at his heels, ready to let them loose on any play of
fancy? The great writer can never go wrong. If Shakespeare gives
a sea-coast to Bohemia, or if Victor Hugo calls an English
prize-fighter Mr. Jim-John-Jack--well, it was so, and that's an end
of it. "There is no second line of rails at that point," said an
editor to a minor author. "I make a second line," said the author;
and he was within his rights, if he can carry his readers'
conviction with him.

But this is a digression from "Ivanhoe." What a book it is! The
second greatest historical novel in our language, I think. Every
successive reading has deepened my admiration for it. Scott's
soldiers are always as good as his women (with exceptions) are weak;
but here, while the soldiers are at their very best, the romantic
figure of Rebecca redeems the female side of the story from the
usual commonplace routine. Scott drew manly men because he was a
manly man himself, and found the task a sympathetic one.

He drew young heroines because a convention demanded it, which he
had never the hardihood to break. It is only when we get him for
a dozen chapters on end with a minimum of petticoat--in the long
stretch, for example, from the beginning of the Tournament to the
end of the Friar Tuck incident--that we realize the height of
continued romantic narrative to which he could attain. I don't
think in the whole range of our literature we have a finer
sustained flight than that.

There is, I admit, an intolerable amount of redundant verbiage in
Scott's novels. Those endless and unnecessary introductions make
the shell very thick before you come to the oyster. They are often
admirable in themselves, learned, witty, picturesque, but with no
relation or proportion to the story which they are supposed to
introduce. Like so much of our English fiction, they are very good
matter in a very bad place. Digression and want of method and order
are traditional national sins. Fancy introducing an essay on how
to live on nothing a year as Thackeray did in "Vanity Fair," or
sandwiching in a ghost story as Dickens has dared to do. As well
might a dramatic author rush up to the footlights and begin
telling anecdotes while his play was suspending its action and his
characters waiting wearily behind him. It is all wrong, though every
great name can be quoted in support of it. Our sense of form is
lamentably lacking, and Sir Walter sinned with the rest. But get
past all that to a crisis in the real story, and who finds the terse
phrase, the short fire-word, so surely as he? Do you remember when
the reckless Sergeant of Dragoons stands at last before the grim
Puritan, upon whose head a price has been set: "A thousand marks or
a bed of heather!" says he, as he draws. The Puritan draws also:
"The Sword of the Lord and of Gideon!" says he. No verbiage there!
But the very spirit of either man and of either party, in the few
stern words, which haunt your mind. "Bows and Bills!" cry the Saxon
Varangians, as the Moslem horse charges home. You feel it is just
what they must have cried. Even more terse and businesslike was the
actual battle-cry of the fathers of the same men on that long-drawn
day when they fought under the "Red Dragon of Wessex" on the low
ridge at Hastings. "Out! Out!" they roared, as the Norman chivalry
broke upon them. Terse, strong, prosaic--the very genius of the
race was in the cry.

Is it that the higher emotions are not there? Or is it that they
are damped down and covered over as too precious to be exhibited?
Something of each, perhaps. I once met the widow of the man who, as
a young signal midshipman, had taken Nelson's famous message from
the Signal Yeoman and communicated it to the ship's company. The
officers were impressed. The men were not. "Duty!" they muttered.
"We've always done it. Why not?" Anything in the least highfalutin'
would depress, not exalt, a British company. It is the under
statement which delights them. German troops can march to battle
singing Luther's hymns. Frenchmen will work themselves into a frenzy
by a song of glory and of Fatherland. Our martial poets need not
trouble to imitate--or at least need not imagine that if they do
so they will ever supply a want to the British soldier. Our sailors
working the heavy guns in South Africa sang: "Here's another lump of
sugar for the Bird." I saw a regiment go into action to the refrain
of "A little bit off the top." The martial poet aforesaid, unless
he had the genius and the insight of a Kipling, would have wasted a
good deal of ink before he had got down to such chants as these. The
Russians are not unlike us in this respect. I remember reading of
some column ascending a breach and singing lustily from start to
finish, until a few survivors were left victorious upon the crest
with the song still going. A spectator inquired what wondrous chant
it was which had warmed them to such a deed of valour, and he found
that the exact meaning of the words, endlessly repeated, was "Ivan
is in the garden picking cabbages." The fact is, I suppose, that a
mere monotonous sound may take the place of the tom-tom of savage
warfare, and hypnotize the soldier into valour.

Our cousins across the Atlantic have the same blending of the comic
with their most serious work. Take the songs which they sang during
the most bloody war which the Anglo-Celtic race has ever waged--the
only war in which it could have been said that they were stretched
to their uttermost and showed their true form--"Tramp, tramp,
tramp," "John Brown's Body," "Marching through Georgia"--all had a
playful humour running through them. Only one exception do I know,
and that is the most tremendous war-song I can recall. Even an
outsider in time of peace can hardly read it without emotion. I
mean, of course, Julia Ward Howe's "War-Song of the Republic," with
the choral opening line: "Mine eyes have seen the glory of the
coming of the Lord." If that were ever sung upon a battle-field the
effect must have been terrific.

A long digression, is it not? But that is the worst of the thoughts
at the other side of the Magic Door. You can't pull one out without
a dozen being entangled with it. But it was Scott's soldiers that I
was talking of, and I was saying that there is nothing theatrical,
no posing, no heroics (the thing of all others which the hero
abominates), but just the short bluff word and the simple manly
ways, with every expression and metaphor drawn from within his
natural range of thought. What a pity it is that he, with his keen
appreciation of the soldier, gave us so little of those soldiers who
were his own contemporaries--the finest, perhaps, that the world
has ever seen! It is true that he wrote a life of the great Soldier
Emperor, but that was the one piece of hackwork of his career. How
could a Tory patriot, whose whole training had been to look upon
Napoleon as a malignant Demon, do justice to such a theme? But the
Europe of those days was full of material which he of all men could
have drawn with a sympathetic hand. What would we not give for a
portrait of one of Murat's light-cavalrymen, or of a Grenadier of
the Old Guard, drawn with the same bold strokes as the Rittmeister
of Gustavus or the archers of the French King's Guard in "Quentin
Durward"?

In his visit to Paris Scott must have seen many of those iron men
who during the preceding twenty years had been the scourge and also
the redemption of Europe. To us the soldiers who scowled at him from
the sidewalks in 1814 would have been as interesting and as much
romantic figures of the past as the mail-clad knights or ruffling
cavaliers of his novels. A picture from the life of a Peninsular
veteran, with his views upon the Duke, would be as striking as
Dugald Dalgetty from the German wars. But then no man ever does
realize the true interest of the age in which he happens to live.
All sense of proportion is lost, and the little thing hard-by
obscures the great thing at a distance. It is easy in the dark to
confuse the fire-fly and the star. Fancy, for example, the Old
Masters seeking their subjects in inn parlours, or St. Sebastians,
while Columbus was discovering America before their very faces.

I have said that I think "Ivanhoe" the best of Scott's novels. I
suppose most people would subscribe to that. But how about the
second best? It speaks well for their general average that there is
hardly one among them which might not find some admirers who would
vote it to a place of honour. To the Scottish-born man those novels
which deal with Scottish life and character have a quality of
raciness which gives them a place apart. There is a rich humour of
the soil in such books as "Old Mortality," "The Antiquary," and "Rob
Roy," which puts them in a different class from the others. His old
Scottish women are, next to his soldiers, the best series of types
that he has drawn. At the same time it must be admitted that merit
which is associated with dialect has such limitations that it can
never take the same place as work which makes an equal appeal to all
the world. On the whole, perhaps, "Quentin Durward," on account of
its wider interests, its strong character-drawing, and the European
importance of the events and people described, would have my vote
for the second place. It is the father of all those sword-and-cape
novels which have formed so numerous an addition to the light
literature of the last century. The pictures of Charles the Bold and
of the unspeakable Louis are extraordinarily vivid. I can see those
two deadly enemies watching the hounds chasing the herald, and
clinging to each other in the convulsion of their cruel mirth, more
clearly than most things which my eyes have actually rested upon.

The portrait of Louis with his astuteness, his cruelty, his
superstition and his cowardice is followed closely from Comines, and
is the more effective when set up against his bluff and war-like
rival. It is not often that historical characters work out in their
actual physique exactly as one would picture them to be, but in the
High Church of Innsbruck I have seen effigies of Louis and Charles
which might have walked from the very pages of Scott-Louis, thin,
ascetic, varminty; and Charles with the head of a prize-fighter. It
is hard on us when a portrait upsets all our preconceived ideas,
when, for example, we see in the National Portrait Gallery a man
with a noble, olive-tinted, poetic face, and with a start read
beneath it that it is the wicked Judge Jeffreys. Occasionally,
however, as at Innsbruck, we are absolutely satisfied. I have
before me on the mantelpiece yonder a portrait of a painting which
represents Queen Mary's Bothwell. Take it down and look at it. Mark
the big head, fit to conceive large schemes; the strong animal face,
made to captivate a sensitive, feminine woman; the brutally forceful
features--the mouth with a suggestion of wild boars' tusks behind
it, the beard which could bristle with fury: the whole man and his
life-history are revealed in that picture. I wonder if Scott had
ever seen the original which hangs at the Hepburn family seat?

Personally, I have always had a very high opinion of a novel which
the critics have used somewhat harshly, and which came almost the
last from his tired pen. I mean "Count Robert of Paris." I am
convinced that if it had been the first, instead of the last, of
the series it would have attracted as much attention as "Waverley."
I can understand the state of mind of the expert, who cried out in
mingled admiration and despair: "I have studied the conditions of
Byzantine Society all my life, and here comes a Scotch lawyer who
makes the whole thing clear to me in a flash!" Many men could draw
with more or less success Norman England, or mediaeval France, but
to reconstruct a whole dead civilization in so plausible a way, with
such dignity and such minuteness of detail, is, I should think,
a most wonderful tour de force. His failing health showed itself
before the end of the novel, but had the latter half equalled the
first, and contained scenes of such humour as Anna Comnena reading
aloud her father's exploits, or of such majesty as the account of
the muster of the Crusaders upon the shores of the Bosphorus, then
the book could not have been gainsaid its rightful place in the very
front rank of the novels.

I would that he had carried on his narrative, and given us a glimpse
of the actual progress of the First Crusade. What an incident! Was
ever anything in the world's history like it? It had what historical
incidents seldom have, a definite beginning, middle and end, from
the half-crazed preaching of Peter down to the Fall of Jerusalem.
Those leaders! It would take a second Homer to do them justice.
Godfrey the perfect soldier and leader, Bohemund the unscrupulous
and formidable, Tancred the ideal knight errant, Robert of Normandy
the half-mad hero! Here is material so rich that one feels one is
not worthy to handle it. What richest imagination could ever evolve
anything more marvellous and thrilling than the actual historical
facts?

But what a glorious brotherhood the novels are! Think of the pure
romance of "The Talisman"; the exquisite picture of Hebridean life
in "The Pirate"; the splendid reproduction of Elizabethan England
in "Kenilworth"; the rich humour of the "Legend of Montrose"; above
all, bear in mind that in all that splendid series, written in a
coarse age, there is not one word to offend the most sensitive car,
and it is borne in upon one how great and noble a man was Walter
Scott, and how high the service which he did for literature and
for humanity.

For that reason his life is good reading, and there it is on the
same shelf as the novels. Lockhart was, of course, his son-in-law
and his admiring friend. The ideal biographer should be a perfectly
impartial man, with a sympathetic mind, but a stern determination to
tell the absolute truth. One would like the frail, human side of a
man as well as the other. I cannot believe that anyone in the world
was ever quite so good as the subject of most of our biographies.
Surely these worthy people swore a little sometimes, or had a keen
eye for a pretty face, or opened the second bottle when they would
have done better to stop at the first, or did something to make us
feel that they were men and brothers. They need not go the length
of the lady who began a biography of her deceased husband with the
words--"D--- was a dirty man," but the books certainly would be
more readable, and the subjects more lovable too, if we had greater
light and shade in the picture.

But I am sure that the more one knew of Scott the more one would
have admired him. He lived in a drinking age, and in a drinking
country, and I have not a doubt that he took an allowance of
toddy occasionally of an evening which would have laid his feeble
successors under the table. His last years, at least, poor fellow,
were abstemious enough, when he sipped his barley-water, while
the others passed the decanter. But what a high-souled chivalrous
gentleman he was, with how fine a sense of honour, translating
itself not into empty phrases, but into years of labour and denial!
You remember how he became sleeping partner in a printing house,
and so involved himself in its failure. There was a legal, but very
little moral, claim against him, and no one could have blamed him
had he cleared the account by a bankruptcy, which would have enabled
him to become a rich man again within a few years. Yet he took the
whole burden upon himself and bore it for the rest of his life,
spending his work, his time, and his health in the one long effort
to save his honour from the shadow of a stain. It was nearly
a hundred thousand pounds, I think, which he passed on to the
creditors--a great record, a hundred thousand pounds, with his
life thrown in.

And what a power of work he had! It was superhuman. Only the man who
has tried to write fiction himself knows what it means when it is
recorded that Scott produced two of his long novels in one single
year. I remember reading in some book of reminiscences--on second
thoughts it was in Lockhart himself--how the writer had lodged
in some rooms in Castle Street, Edinburgh, and how he had seen
all evening the silhouette of a man outlined on the blind of the
opposite house. All evening the man wrote, and the observer could
see the shadow hand conveying the sheets of paper from the desk to
the pile at the side. He went to a party and returned, but still
the hand was moving the sheets. Next morning he was told that the
rooms opposite were occupied by Walter Scott.

A curious glimpse into the psychology of the writer of fiction
is shown by the fact that he wrote two of his books--good ones,
too--at a time when his health was such that he could not afterwards
remember one word of them, and listened to them when they were read
to him as if he were hearing the work of another man. Apparently
the simplest processes of the brain, such as ordinary memory, were
in complete abeyance, and yet the very highest and most complex
faculty--imagination in its supreme form--was absolutely unimpaired.
It is an extraordinary fact, and one to be pondered over. It gives
some support to the feeling which every writer of imaginative work
must have, that his supreme work comes to him in some strange way
from without, and that he is only the medium for placing it upon
the paper. The creative thought--the germ thought from which a
larger growth is to come, flies through his brain like a bullet.
He is surprised at his own idea, with no conscious sense of having
originated it. And here we have a man, with all other brain
functions paralyzed, producing this magnificent work. Is it possible
that we are indeed but conduit pipes from the infinite reservoir of
the unknown? Certainly it is always our best work which leaves the
least sense of personal effort.

And to pursue this line of thought, is it possible that frail
physical powers and an unstable nervous system, by keeping a man's
materialism at its lowest, render him a more fitting agent for these
spiritual uses? It is an old tag that

"Great Genius is to madness close allied,
And thin partitions do those rooms divide."

But, apart from genius, even a moderate faculty for imaginative work
seems to me to weaken seriously the ties between the soul and the
body.

Look at the British poets of a century ago: Chatterton, Burns,
Shelley, Keats, Byron. Burns was the oldest of that brilliant band,
yet Burns was only thirty-eight when he passed away, "burned out,"
as his brother terribly expressed it. Shelley, it is true, died
by accident, and Chatterton by poison, but suicide is in itself a
sign of a morbid state. It is true that Rogers lived to be almost
a centenarian, but he was banker first and poet afterwards.
Wordsworth, Tennyson, and Browning have all raised the average age
of the poets, but for some reason the novelists, especially of late
years, have a deplorable record. They will end by being scheduled
with the white-lead workers and other dangerous trades. Look at the
really shocking case of the young Americans, for example. What a
band of promising young writers have in a few years been swept away!
There was the author of that admirable book, "David Harum"; there
was Frank Norris, a man who had in him, I think, the seeds of
greatness more than almost any living writer. His "Pit" seemed to me
one of the finest American novels. He also died a premature death.
Then there was Stephen Crane--a man who had also done most brilliant
work, and there was Harold Frederic, another master-craftsman. Is
there any profession in the world which in proportion to its numbers
could show such losses as that? In the meantime, out of our own men
Robert Louis Stevenson is gone, and Henry Seton Merriman, and many
another.

Even those great men who are usually spoken of as if they had
rounded off their career were really premature in their end.
Thackeray, for example, in spite of his snowy head, was only 52;
Dickens attained the age of 58; on the whole, Sir Walter, with his
61 years of life, although he never wrote a novel until he was
over 40, had, fortunately for the world, a longer working career
than most of his brethren.

He employed his creative faculty for about twenty years, which is
as much, I suppose, as Shakespeare did. The bard of Avon is another
example of the limited tenure which Genius has of life, though I
believe that he outlived the greater part of his own family, who
were not a healthy stock. He died, I should judge, of some nervous
disease; that is shown by the progressive degeneration of his
signature. Probably it was locomotor ataxy, which is the special
scourge of the imaginative man. Heine, Daudet, and how many more,
were its victims. As to the tradition, first mentioned long after
his death, that he died of a fever contracted from a drinking bout,
it is absurd on the face of it, since no such fever is known to
science. But a very moderate drinking bout would be extremely
likely to bring a chronic nervous complaint to a disastrous end.

One other remark upon Scott before I pass on from that line of green
volumes which has made me so digressive and so garrulous. No account
of his character is complete which does not deal with the strange,
secretive vein which ran through his nature. Not only did he stretch
the truth on many occasions in order to conceal the fact that he was
the author of the famous novels, but even intimate friends who met
him day by day were not aware that he was the man about whom the
whole of Europe was talking. Even his wife was ignorant of his
pecuniary liabilities until the crash of the Ballantyne firm told
her for the first time that they were sharers in the ruin. A
psychologist might trace this strange twist of his mind in the
numerous elfish Fenella-like characters who flit about and keep
their irritating secret through the long chapters of so many of
his novels.

It's a sad book, Lockhart's "Life." It leaves gloom in the mind.
The sight of this weary giant, staggering along, burdened with debt,
overladen with work, his wife dead, his nerves broken, and nothing
intact but his honour, is one of the most moving in the history of
literature. But they pass, these clouds, and all that is left is
the memory of the supremely noble man, who would not be bent, but
faced Fate to the last, and died in his tracks without a whimper.
He sampled every human emotion. Great was his joy and great his
success, great was his downfall and bitter his grief. But of all the
sons of men I don't think there are many greater than he who lies
under the great slab at Dryburgh.

III.

We can pass the long green ranks of the Waverley Novels and
Lockhart's "Life" which flanks them. Here is heavier metal in the
four big grey volumes beyond. They are an old-fashioned large-print
edition of Boswell's "Life of Johnson." I emphasize the large print,
for that is the weak point of most of the cheap editions of English
Classics which come now into the market. With subjects which are in
the least archaic or abstruse you need good clear type to help you
on your way. The other is good neither for your eyes nor for your
temper. Better pay a little more and have a book that is made for
use.

That book interests me--fascinates me--and yet I wish I could join
heartily in that chorus of praise which the kind-hearted old bully
has enjoyed. It is difficult to follow his own advice and to "clear
one's mind of cant" upon the subject, for when you have been
accustomed to look at him through the sympathetic glasses of
Macaulay or of Boswell, it is hard to take them off, to rub one's
eyes, and to have a good honest stare on one's own account at the
man's actual words, deeds, and limitations. If you try it you are
left with the oddest mixture of impressions. How could one express
it save that this is John Bull taken to literature--the exaggerated
John Bull of the caricaturists--with every quality, good or evil,
at its highest? Here are the rough crust over a kindly heart, the
explosive temper, the arrogance, the insular narrowness, the want of
sympathy and insight, the rudeness of perception, the positiveness,
the overbearing bluster, the strong deep-seated religious principle,
and every other characteristic of the cruder, rougher John Bull who
was the great grandfather of the present good-natured Johnnie.

If Boswell had not lived I wonder how much we should hear now of his
huge friend? With Scotch persistence he has succeeded in inoculating
the whole world with his hero worship. It was most natural that he
should himself admire him. The relations between the two men were
delightful and reflect all credit upon each. But they are not a
safe basis from which any third person could argue. When they met,
Boswell was in his twenty-third and Johnson in his fifty-fourth
year. The one was a keen young Scot with a mind which was reverent
and impressionable. The other was a figure from a past generation
with his fame already made. From the moment of meeting the one was
bound to exercise an absolute ascendency over the other which made
unbiassed criticism far more difficult than it would be between
ordinary father and son. Up to the end this was the unbroken
relation between them.

It is all very well to pooh-pooh Boswell as Macaulay has done, but
it is not by chance that a man writes the best biography in the
language. He had some great and rare literary qualities. One was
a clear and vivid style, more flexible and Saxon than that of his
great model. Another was a remarkable discretion which hardly once
permitted a fault of taste in this whole enormous book where he must
have had to pick his steps with pitfalls on every side of him. They
say that he was a fool and a coxcomb in private life. He is never so
with a pen in his hand. Of all his numerous arguments with Johnson,
where he ventured some little squeak of remonstrance, before the
roaring "No, sir!" came to silence him, there are few in which his
views were not, as experience proved, the wiser. On the question
of slavery he was in the wrong. But I could quote from memory at
least a dozen cases, including such vital subjects as the American
Revolution, the Hanoverian Dynasty, Religious Toleration, and so on,
where Boswell's views were those which survived.

But where he excels as a biographer is in telling you just those
little things that you want to know. How often you read the life of
a man and are left without the remotest idea of his personality. It
is not so here. The man lives again. There is a short description
of Johnson's person--it is not in the Life, but in the Tour to the
Hebrides, the very next book upon the shelf, which is typical of
his vivid portraiture. May I take it down, and read you a paragraph
of it?--

"His person was large, robust, I may say approaching to the
gigantic, and grown unwieldy from corpulency. His countenance
was naturally of the cast of an ancient statue, but somewhat
disfigured by the scars of King's evil. He was now in his
sixty-fourth year and was become a little dull of hearing. His
sight had always been somewhat weak, yet so much does mind
govern and even supply the deficiencies of organs that his
perceptions were uncommonly quick and accurate. His head, and
sometimes also his body, shook with a kind of motion like
the effect of palsy. He appeared to be frequently disturbed
by cramps or convulsive contractions of the nature of that
distemper called St. Vitus' dance. He wore a full suit of
plain brown clothes, with twisted hair buttons of the same
colour, a large bushy greyish wig, a plain shirt, black worsted
stockings and silver buckles. Upon this tour when journeying he
wore boots and a very wide brown cloth great-coat with pockets
which might almost have held the two volumes of his folio
dictionary, and he carried in his hand a large English oak
stick."

You must admit that if one cannot reconstruct the great Samuel after
that it is not Mr. Boswell's fault--and it is but one of a dozen
equally vivid glimpses which he gives us of his hero. It is just
these pen-pictures of his of the big, uncouth man, with his grunts
and his groans, his Gargantuan appetite, his twenty cups of tea, and
his tricks with the orange-peel and the lamp-posts, which fascinate
the reader, and have given Johnson a far broader literary vogue than
his writings could have done.

For, after all, which of those writings can be said to have any life
to-day? Not "Rasselas," surely--that stilted romance. "The Lives of
the Poets" are but a succession of prefaces, and the "Ramblers" of
ephemeral essays. There is the monstrous drudgery of the Dictionary,
a huge piece of spadework, a monument to industry, but inconceivable
to genius. "London" has a few vigorous lines, and the "Journey to
the Hebrides" some spirited pages. This, with a number of political
and other pamphlets, was the main output of his lifetime. Surely it
must be admitted that it is not enough to justify his predominant
place in English literature, and that we must turn to his humble,
much-ridiculed biographer for the real explanation.

And then there was his talk. What was it which gave it such
distinction? His clear-cut positiveness upon every subject. But this
is a sign of a narrow finality--impossible to the man of sympathy
and of imagination, who sees the other side of every question and
understands what a little island the greatest human knowledge must
be in the ocean of infinite possibilities which surround us. Look at
the results. Did ever any single man, the very dullest of the race,
stand convicted of so many incredible blunders? It recalls the
remark of Bagehot, that if at any time the views of the most learned
could be stamped upon the whole human race the result would be
to propagate the most absurd errors. He was asked what became of
swallows in the winter. Rolling and wheezing, the oracle answered:
"Swallows," said he, "certainly sleep all the winter. A number of
them conglobulate together by flying round and round, and then all
in a heap throw themselves under water and lie in the bed of a
river." Boswell gravely dockets the information. However, if I
remember right, even so sound a naturalist as White of Selborne
had his doubts about the swallows. More wonderful are Johnson's
misjudgments of his fellow-authors. There, if anywhere, one would
have expected to find a sense of proportion. Yet his conclusions
would seem monstrous to a modern taste. "Shakespeare," he said,
"never wrote six consecutive good lines." He would only admit
two good verses in Gray's exquisite "Elegy written in a Country
Churchyard," where it would take a very acid critic to find two bad
ones. "Tristram Shandy" would not live. "Hamlet" was gabble. Swift's
"Gulliver's Travels" was poor stuff, and he never wrote anything
good except "A Tale of a Tub." Voltaire was illiterate. Rousseau was
a scoundrel. Deists, like Hume, Priestley, or Gibbon, could not be
honest men.

And his political opinions! They sound now like a caricature. I
suppose even in those days they were reactionary. "A poor man has no
honour." "Charles the Second was a good King." "Governments should
turn out of the Civil Service all who were on the other side."
"Judges in India should be encouraged to trade." "No country is the
richer on account of trade." (I wonder if Adam Smith was in the
company when this proposition was laid down!) "A landed proprietor
should turn out those tenants who did not vote as he wished." "It is
not good for a labourer to have his wages raised." "When the balance
of trade is against a country, the margin must be paid in current
coin." Those were a few of his convictions.

And then his prejudices! Most of us have some unreasoning aversion.
In our more generous moments we are not proud of it. But consider
those of Johnson! When they were all eliminated there was not so
very much left. He hated Whigs. He disliked Scotsmen. He detested
Nonconformists (a young lady who joined them was "an odious wench").
He loathed Americans. So he walked his narrow line, belching fire
and fury at everything to the right or the left of it. Macaulay's
posthumous admiration is all very well, but had they met in life
Macaulay would have contrived to unite under one hat nearly
everything that Johnson abominated.

It cannot be said that these prejudices were founded on any strong
principle, or that they could not be altered where his own personal
interests demanded it. This is one of the weak points of his record.
In his dictionary he abused pensions and pensioners as a means by
which the State imposed slavery upon hirelings. When he wrote the
unfortunate definition a pension must have seemed a most improbable
contingency, but when George III., either through policy or charity,
offered him one a little later, he made no hesitation in accepting
it. One would have liked to feel that the violent expression of his
convictions represented a real intensity of feeling, but the facts
in this instance seem against it.

He was a great talker--but his talk was more properly a monologue.
It was a discursive essay, with perhaps a few marginal notes from
his subdued audience. How could one talk on equal terms with a man
who could not brook contradiction or even argument upon the most
vital questions in life? Would Goldsmith defend his literary views,
or Burke his Whiggism, or Gibbon his Deism? There was no common
ground of philosophic toleration on which one could stand. If he
could not argue he would be rude, or, as Goldsmith put it: "If his
pistol missed fire, he would knock you down with the butt end."
In the face of that "rhinoceros laugh" there was an end of gentle
argument. Napoleon said that all the other kings would say "Ouf!"
when they heard he was dead, and so I cannot help thinking that the
older men of Johnson's circle must have given a sigh of relief when
at last they could speak freely on that which was near their hearts,
without the danger of a scene where "Why, no, sir!" was very likely
to ripen into "Let us have no more on't!" Certainly one would like
to get behind Boswell's account, and to hear a chat between such
men as Burke and Reynolds, as to the difference in the freedom and
atmosphere of the Club on an evening when the formidable Doctor was
not there, as compared to one when he was.

No smallest estimate of his character is fair which does not
make due allowance for the terrible experiences of his youth and
early middle age. His spirit was as scarred as his face. He was
fifty-three when the pension was given him, and up to then his
existence had been spent in one constant struggle for the first
necessities of life, for the daily meal and the nightly bed. He had
seen his comrades of letters die of actual privation. From childhood
he had known no happiness. The half blind gawky youth, with dirty
linen and twitching limbs, had always, whether in the streets of
Lichfield, the quadrangle of Pembroke, or the coffee-houses of
London, been an object of mingled pity and amusement. With a proud
and sensitive soul, every day of his life must have brought some
bitter humiliation. Such an experience must either break a man's
spirit or embitter it, and here, no doubt, was the secret of that
roughness, that carelessness for the sensibilities of others, which
caused Boswell's father to christen him "Ursa Major." If his nature
was in any way warped, it must be admitted that terrific forces had
gone to the rending of it. His good was innate, his evil the result
of a dreadful experience.

And he had some great qualities. Memory was the chief of them. He
had read omnivorously, and all that he had read he remembered, not
merely in the vague, general way in which we remember what we read,
but with every particular of place and date. If it were poetry, he
could quote it by the page, Latin or English. Such a memory has its
enormous advantage, but it carries with it its corresponding defect.
With the mind so crammed with other people's goods, how can you have
room for any fresh manufactures of your own? A great memory is, I
think, often fatal to originality, in spite of Scott and some other
exceptions. The slate must be clear before you put your own writing
upon it. When did Johnson ever discover an original thought, when
did he ever reach forward into the future, or throw any fresh light
upon those enigmas with which mankind is faced? Overloaded with the
past, he had space for nothing else. Modern developments of every
sort cast no first herald rays upon his mind. He journeyed in France
a few years before the greatest cataclysm that the world has ever
known, and his mind, arrested by much that was trivial, never once
responded to the storm-signals which must surely have been visible
around him. We read that an amiable Monsieur Sansterre showed him
over his brewery and supplied him with statistics as to his output
of beer. It was the same foul-mouthed Sansterre who struck up the
drums to drown Louis' voice at the scaffold. The association shows
how near the unconscious sage was to the edge of that precipice and
how little his learning availed him in discerning it.

He would have been a great lawyer or divine. Nothing, one would
think, could have kept him from Canterbury or from the Woolsack. In
either case his memory, his learning, his dignity, and his inherent
sense of piety and justice, would have sent him straight to the top.
His brain, working within its own limitations, was remarkable. There
is no more wonderful proof of this than his opinions on questions of
Scotch law, as given to Boswell and as used by the latter before the
Scotch judges. That an outsider with no special training should at
short notice write such weighty opinions, crammed with argument and
reason, is, I think, as remarkable a tour de force as literature can
show.

Above all, he really was a very kind-hearted man, and that must
count for much. His was a large charity, and it came from a small
purse. The rooms of his house became a sort of harbour of refuge
in which several strange battered hulks found their last moorings.
There were the blind Mr. Levett, and the acidulous Mrs. Williams,
and the colourless Mrs. De Moulins, all old and ailing--a trying
group amid which to spend one's days. His guinea was always ready
for the poor acquaintance, and no poet was so humble that he might
not preface his book with a dedication whose ponderous and sonorous
sentences bore the hall-mark of their maker. It is the rough,
kindly man, the man who bore the poor street-walker home upon his
shoulders, who makes one forget, or at least forgive, the dogmatic
pedantic Doctor of the Club.

There is always to me something of interest in the view which a
great man takes of old age and death. It is the practical test of
how far the philosophy of his life has been a sound one. Hume saw
death afar, and met it with unostentatious calm. Johnson's mind
flinched from that dread opponent. His letters and his talk during
his latter years are one long cry of fear. It was not cowardice, for
physically he was one of the most stout-hearted men that ever lived.
There were no limits to his courage. It was spiritual diffidence,
coupled with an actual belief in the possibilities of the other
world, which a more humane and liberal theology has done something
to soften. How strange to see him cling so desperately to that crazy
body, with its gout, its asthma, its St. Vitus' dance, and its six
gallons of dropsy! What could be the attraction of an existence
where eight hours of every day were spent groaning in a chair, and
sixteen wheezing in a bed? "I would give one of these legs," said
he, "for another year of life." None the less, when the hour did
at last strike, no man could have borne himself with more simple
dignity and courage. Say what you will of him, and resent him how
you may, you can never open those four grey volumes without getting
some mental stimulus, some desire for wider reading, some insight
into human learning or character, which should leave you a better
and a wiser man.

IV.

Next to my Johnsoniana are my Gibbons--two editions, if you please,
for my old complete one being somewhat crabbed in the print I could
not resist getting a set of Bury's new six-volume presentment of the
History. In reading that book you don't want to be handicapped in
any way. You want fair type, clear paper, and a light volume. You
are not to read it lightly, but with some earnestness of purpose and
keenness for knowledge, with a classical atlas at your elbow and a
note-book hard by, taking easy stages and harking back every now
and then to keep your grip of the past and to link it up with what
follows. There are no thrills in it. You won't be kept out of your
bed at night, nor will you forget your appointments during the day,
but you will feel a certain sedate pleasure in the doing of it, and
when it is done you will have gained something which you can never
lose--something solid, something definite, something that will make
you broader and deeper than before.

Were I condemned to spend a year upon a desert island and allowed
only one book for my companion, it is certainly that which I should
choose. For consider how enormous is its scope, and what food for
thought is contained within those volumes. It covers a thousand
years of the world's history, it is full and good and accurate, its
standpoint is broadly philosophic, its style dignified. With our
more elastic methods we may consider his manner pompous, but he
lived in an age when Johnson's turgid periods had corrupted our
literature. For my own part I do not dislike Gibbon's pomposity. A
paragraph should be measured and sonorous if it ventures to describe
the advance of a Roman legion, or the debate of a Greek Senate. You
are wafted upwards, with this lucid and just spirit by your side
upholding and instructing you. Beneath you are warring nations, the
clash of races, the rise and fall of dynasties, the conflict of
creeds. Serene you float above them all, and ever as the panorama
flows past, the weighty measured unemotional voice whispers the true
meaning of the scene into your ear.

It is a most mighty story that is told. You begin with a description
of the state of the Roman Empire when the early Caesars were on the
throne, and when it was undisputed mistress of the world. You pass
down the line of the Emperors with their strange alternations of
greatness and profligacy, descending occasionally to criminal
lunacy. When the Empire went rotten it began at the top, and it
took centuries to corrupt the man behind the spear. Neither did a
religion of peace affect him much, for, in spite of the adoption of
Christianity, Roman history was still written in blood. The new
creed had only added a fresh cause of quarrel and violence to the
many which already existed, and the wars of angry nations were mild
compared to those of excited sectaries.

Then came the mighty rushing wind from without, blowing from the
waste places of the world, destroying, confounding, whirling madly
through the old order, leaving broken chaos behind it, but finally
cleansing and purifying that which was stale and corrupt. A
storm-centre somewhere in the north of China did suddenly what it
may very well do again. The human volcano blew its top off, and
Europe was covered by the destructive debris. The absurd point is
that it was not the conquerors who overran the Roman Empire, but it
was the terrified fugitives, who, like a drove of stampeded cattle,
blundered over everything which barred their way. It was a wild,
dramatic time--the time of the formation of the modern races of
Europe. The nations came whirling in out of the north and east like
dust-storms, and amid the seeming chaos each was blended with its
neighbour so as to toughen the fibre of the whole. The fickle Gaul
got his steadying from the Franks, the steady Saxon got his touch of
refinement from the Norman, the Italian got a fresh lease of life
from the Lombard and the Ostrogoth, the corrupt Greek made way for
the manly and earnest Mahommedan. Everywhere one seems to see a
great hand blending the seeds. And so one can now, save only that
emigration has taken the place of war. It does not, for example,
take much prophetic power to say that something very great is being
built up on the other side of the Atlantic. When on an Anglo-Celtic
basis you see the Italian, the Hun, and the Scandinavian being
added, you feel that there is no human quality which may not be
thereby evolved.

But to revert to Gibbon: the next stage is the flight of Empire from
Rome to Byzantium, even as the Anglo-Celtic power might find its
centre some day not in London but in Chicago or Toronto. There is
the whole strange story of the tidal wave of Mahommedanism from the
south, submerging all North Africa, spreading right and left to
India on the one side and to Spain on the other, finally washing
right over the walls of Byzantium until it, the bulwark of
Christianity, became what it is now, the advanced European fortress
of the Moslem. Such is the tremendous narrative covering half the
world's known history, which can all be acquired and made part of
yourself by the aid of that humble atlas, pencil, and note-book
already recommended.

When all is so interesting it is hard to pick examples, but to me
there has always seemed to be something peculiarly impressive in
the first entrance of a new race on to the stage of history. It has
something of the glamour which hangs round the early youth of a
great man. You remember how the Russians made their debut--came
down the great rivers and appeared at the Bosphorus in two hundred
canoes, from which they endeavoured to board the Imperial galleys.
Singular that a thousand years have passed and that the ambition
of the Russians is still to carry out the task at which their
skin-clad ancestors failed. Or the Turks again; you may recall the
characteristic ferocity with which they opened their career. A
handful of them were on some mission to the Emperor. The town was
besieged from the landward side by the barbarians, and the Asiatics
obtained leave to take part in a skirmish. The first Turk galloped
out, shot a barbarian with his arrow, and then, lying down beside
him, proceeded to suck his blood, which so horrified the man's
comrades that they could not be brought to face such uncanny
adversaries. So, from opposite sides, those two great races arrived
at the city which was to be the stronghold of the one and the
ambition of the other for so many centuries.

And then, even more interesting than the races which arrive are
those that disappear. There is something there which appeals most
powerfully to the imagination. Take, for example, the fate of those
Vandals who conquered the north of Africa. They were a German tribe,
blue-eyed and flaxen-haired, from somewhere in the Elbe country.
Suddenly they, too, were seized with the strange wandering madness
which was epidemic at the time. Away they went on the line of least
resistance, which is always from north to south and from east to
west. South-west was the course of the Vandals--a course which must
have been continued through pure love of adventure, since in the
thousands of miles which they traversed there were many fair
resting-places, if that were only their quest.

They crossed the south of France, conquered Spain, and, finally, the
more adventurous passed over into Africa, where they occupied the
old Roman province. For two or three generations they held it, much
as the English hold India, and their numbers were at the least some
hundreds of thousands. Presently the Roman Empire gave one of those
flickers which showed that there was still some fire among the
ashes. Belisarius landed in Africa and reconquered the province. The
Vandals were cut off from the sea and fled inland. Whither did they
carry those blue eyes and that flaxen hair? Were they exterminated
by the negroes, or did they amalgamate with them? Travellers have
brought back stories from the Mountains of the Moon of a Negroid
race with light eyes and hair. Is it possible that here we have some
trace of the vanished Germans?

It recalls the parallel case of the lost settlements in Greenland.
That also has always seemed to me to be one of the most romantic
questions in history--the more so, perhaps, as I have strained my
eyes to see across the ice-floes the Greenland coast at the point
(or near it) where the old "Eyrbyggia" must have stood. That was the
Scandinavian city, founded by colonists from Iceland, which grew to
be a considerable place, so much so that they sent to Denmark for a
bishop. That would be in the fourteenth century. The bishop, coming
out to his see, found that he was unable to reach it on account of a
climatic change which had brought down the ice and filled the strait
between Iceland and Greenland. From that day to this no one has been
able to say what has become of these old Scandinavians, who were
at the time, be it remembered, the most civilized and advanced
race in Europe. They may have been overwhelmed by the Esquimaux,
the despised Skroeling--or they may have amalgamated with them--or
conceivably they might have held their own. Very little is known yet
of that portion of the coast. It would be strange if some Nansen or
Peary were to stumble upon the remains of the old colony, and find
possibly in that antiseptic atmosphere a complete mummy of some
bygone civilization.

But once more to return to Gibbon. What a mind it must have been
which first planned, and then, with the incessant labour of twenty
years, carried out that enormous work! There was no classical author
so little known, no Byzantine historian so diffuse, no monkish
chronicle so crabbed, that they were not assimilated and worked into
their appropriate place in the huge framework. Great application,
great perseverance, great attention to detail was needed in all
this, but the coral polyp has all those qualities, and somehow in
the heart of his own creation the individuality of the man himself
becomes as insignificant and as much overlooked as that of the
little creature that builds the reef. A thousand know Gibbon's work
for one who cares anything for Gibbon.

And on the whole this is justified by the facts. Some men are
greater than their work. Their work only represents one facet of
their character, and there may be a dozen others, all remarkable,
and uniting to make one complex and unique creature. It was not so
with Gibbon. He was a cold-blooded man, with a brain which seemed to
have grown at the expense of his heart. I cannot recall in his life
one generous impulse, one ardent enthusiasm, save for the Classics.
His excellent judgment was never clouded by the haze of human
emotion--or, at least, it was such an emotion as was well under
the control of his will. Could anything be more laudable--or less
lovable? He abandons his girl at the order of his father, and sums
it up that he "sighs as a lover but obeys as a son." The father
dies, and he records the fact with the remark that "the tears of
a son are seldom lasting." The terrible spectacle of the French
Revolution excited in his mind only a feeling of self-pity because
his retreat in Switzerland was invaded by the unhappy refugees, just
as a grumpy country gentleman in England might complain that he
was annoyed by the trippers. There is a touch of dislike in all
the allusions which Boswell makes to Gibbon--often without even
mentioning his name--and one cannot read the great historian's life
without understanding why.

I should think that few men have been born with the material for
self-sufficient contentment more completely within himself than
Edward Gibbon. He had every gift which a great scholar should have,
an insatiable thirst for learning in every form, immense industry,
a retentive memory, and that broadly philosophic temperament which
enables a man to rise above the partisan and to become the impartial
critic of human affairs. It is true that at the time he was looked
upon as bitterly prejudiced in the matter of religious thought, but
his views are familiar to modern philosophy, and would shock no
susceptibilities in these more liberal (and more virtuous) days.
Turn him up in that Encyclopedia, and see what the latest word is
upon his contentions. "Upon the famous fifteenth and sixteenth
chapters it is not necessary to dwell," says the biographer,
"because at this time of day no Christian apologist dreams of
denying the substantial truth of any of the more important
allegations of Gibbon. Christians may complain of the suppression
of some circumstances which might influence the general result, and
they must remonstrate against the unfair construction of their case.
But they no longer refuse to hear any reasonable evidence tending to
show that persecution was less severe than had been once believed,
and they have slowly learned that they can afford to concede the
validity of all the secondary causes assigned by Gibbon and even of
others still more discreditable. The fact is, as the historian has
again and again admitted, that his account of the secondary causes
which contributed to the progress and establishment of Christianity
leaves the question as to the natural or supernatural origin of
Christianity practically untouched." This is all very well, but in
that case how about the century of abuse which has been showered
upon the historian? Some posthumous apology would seem to be called
for.

Physically, Gibbon was as small as Johnson was large, but there was
a curious affinity in their bodily ailments. Johnson, as a youth,
was ulcerated and tortured by the king's evil, in spite of the Royal
touch. Gibbon gives us a concise but lurid account of his own
boyhood.

"I was successively afflicted by lethargies and fevers, by
opposite tendencies to a consumptive and dropsical habit,
by a contraction of my nerves, a fistula in my eye, and the
bite of a dog, most vehemently suspected of madness. Every
practitioner was called to my aid, the fees of the doctors
were swelled by the bills of the apothecaries and surgeons.
There was a time when I swallowed more physic than food, and
my body is still marked by the indelible scars of lancets,
issues, and caustics."

Such is his melancholy report. The fact is that the England of that
day seems to have been very full of that hereditary form of chronic
ill-health which we call by the general name of struma. How far
the hard-drinking habits in vogue for a century or so before had
anything to do with it I cannot say, nor can I trace a connection
between struma and learning; but one has only to compare this
account of Gibbon with Johnson's nervous twitches, his scarred face
and his St. Vitus' dance, to realize that these, the two most solid
English writers of their generation, were each heir to the same
gruesome inheritance.

I wonder if there is any picture extant of Gibbon in the character
of subaltern in the South Hampshire Militia? With his small frame,
his huge head, his round, chubby face, and the pretentious uniform,
he must have looked a most extraordinary figure. Never was there so
round a peg in a square hole! His father, a man of a very different
type, held a commission, and this led to poor Gibbon becoming a
soldier in spite of himself. War had broken out, the regiment was
mustered, and the unfortunate student, to his own utter dismay, was
kept under arms until the conclusion of hostilities. For three years
he was divorced from his books, and loudly and bitterly did he
resent it. The South Hampshire Militia never saw the enemy, which is
perhaps as well for them. Even Gibbon himself pokes fun at them; but
after three years under canvas it is probable that his men had more
cause to smile at their book-worm captain than he at his men. His
hand closed much more readily on a pen-handle than on a sword-hilt.
In his lament, one of the items is that his colonel's example
encouraged the daily practice of hard and even excessive drinking,
which gave him the gout. "The loss of so many busy and idle hours
were not compensated for by any elegant pleasure," says he; "and my
temper was insensibly soured by the society of rustic officers, who
were alike deficient in the knowledge of scholars and the manners
of gentlemen." The picture of Gibbon flushed with wine at the
mess-table, with these hard-drinking squires around him, must
certainly have been a curious one. He admits, however, that he
found consolations as well as hardships in his spell of soldiering.
It made him an Englishman once more, it improved his health, it
changed the current of his thoughts. It was even useful to him as
an historian. In a celebrated and characteristic sentence, he says,
"The discipline and evolutions of a modern battalion gave me a
clearer notion of the Phalanx and the Legions, and the captain of
the Hampshire Grenadiers has not been useless to the historian of
the Roman Empire."

If we don't know all about Gibbon it is not his fault, for he wrote
no fewer than six accounts of his own career, each differing from
the other, and all equally bad. A man must have more heart and
soul than Gibbon to write a good autobiography. It is the most
difficult of all human compositions, calling for a mixture of tact,
discretion, and frankness which make an almost impossible blend.
Gibbon, in spite of his foreign education, was a very typical
Englishman in many ways, with the reticence, self-respect, and
self-consciousness of the race. No British autobiography has ever
been frank, and consequently no British autobiography has ever been
good. Trollope's, perhaps, is as good as any that I know, but of
all forms of literature it is the one least adapted to the national
genius. You could not imagine a British Rousseau, still less a
British Benvenuto Cellini. In one way it is to the credit of the
race that it should be so. If we do as much evil as our neighbours
we at least have grace enough to be ashamed of it and to suppress
its publication.

There on the left of Gibbon is my fine edition (Lord Braybrooke's)
of Pepys' Diary. That is, in truth, the greatest autobiography in
our language, and yet it was not deliberately written as such. When
Mr. Pepys jotted down from day to day every quaint or mean thought
which came into his head he would have been very much surprised
had any one told him that he was doing a work quite unique in our
literature. Yet his involuntary autobiography, compiled for some
obscure reason or for private reference, but certainly never meant
for publication, is as much the first in that line of literature
as Boswell's book among biographies or Gibbon's among histories.

As a race we are too afraid of giving ourselves away ever to produce
a good autobiography. We resent the charge of national hypocrisy,
and yet of all nations we are the least frank as to our own
emotions--especially on certain sides of them. Those affairs of the
heart, for example, which are such an index to a man's character,
and so profoundly modify his life--what space do they fill in any
man's autobiography? Perhaps in Gibbon's case the omission matters
little, for, save in the instance of his well-controlled passion
for the future Madame Neckar, his heart was never an organ which
gave him much trouble. The fact is that when the British author
tells his own story he tries to make himself respectable, and the
more respectable a man is the less interesting does he become.
Rousseau may prove himself a maudlin degenerate. Cellini may stand
self-convicted as an amorous ruffian. If they are not respectable
they are thoroughly human and interesting all the same.

The wonderful thing about Mr. Pepys is that a man should succeed in
making himself seem so insignificant when really he must have been
a man of considerable character and attainments. Who would guess
it who read all these trivial comments, these catalogues of what
he had for dinner, these inane domestic confidences--all the more
interesting for their inanity! The effect left upon the mind is
of some grotesque character in a play, fussy, self-conscious,
blustering with women, timid with men, dress-proud, purse-proud,
trimming in politics and in religion, a garrulous gossip immersed
always in trifles. And yet, though this was the day-by-day man,
the year-by-year man was a very different person, a devoted civil
servant, an eloquent orator, an excellent writer, a capable
musician, and a ripe scholar who accumulated 3000 volumes--a large
private library in those days--and had the public spirit to leave
them all to his University. You can forgive old Pepys a good deal of
his philandering when you remember that he was the only official of
the Navy Office who stuck to his post during the worst days of the
Plague. He may have been--indeed, he assuredly was--a coward, but
the coward who has sense of duty enough to overcome his cowardice
is the most truly brave of mankind.

But the one amazing thing which will never be explained about Pepys
is what on earth induced him to go to the incredible labour of
writing down in shorthand cipher not only all the trivialities of
his life, but even his own very gross delinquencies which any other
man would have been only too glad to forget. The Diary was kept for
about ten years, and was abandoned because the strain upon his eyes
of the crabbed shorthand was helping to destroy his sight. I suppose
that he became so familiar with it that he wrote it and read it as
easily as he did ordinary script. But even so, it was a huge labour
to compile these books of strange manuscript. Was it an effort to
leave some memorial of his own existence to single him out from all
the countless sons of men? In such a case he would assuredly have
left directions in somebody's care with a reference to it in the
deed by which he bequeathed his library to Cambridge. In that way
he could have ensured having his Diary read at any date he chose to
name after his death. But no allusion to it was left, and if it had
not been for the ingenuity and perseverance of a single scholar
the dusty volumes would still lie unread in some top shelf of the
Pepysian Library. Publicity, then, was not his object. What could it
have been? The only alternative is reference and self-information.
You will observe in his character a curious vein of method and
order, by which he loved, to be for ever estimating his exact
wealth, cataloguing his books, or scheduling his possessions. It is
conceivable that this systematic recording of his deeds--even of his
misdeeds--was in some sort analogous, sprung from a morbid tidiness
of mind. It may be a weak explanation, but it is difficult to
advance another one.

One minor point which must strike the reader of Pepys is how musical
a nation the English of that day appear to have been. Every one
seems to have had command of some instrument, many of several.
Part-singing was common. There is not much of Charles the Second's
days which we need envy, but there, at least, they seem to have
had the advantage of us. It was real music, too--music of dignity
and tenderness--with words which were worthy of such treatment.
This cult may have been the last remains of those mediaeval
pre-Reformation days when the English Church choirs were, as I have
read somewhere, the most famous in Europe. A strange thing this for
a land which in the whole of last century has produced no single
master of the first rank!

What national change is it which has driven music from the land? Has
life become so serious that song has passed out of it? In Southern
climes one hears poor folk sing for pure lightness of heart. In
England, alas, the sound of a poor man's voice raised in song means
only too surely that he is drunk. And yet it is consoling to know
that the germ of the old powers is always there ready to sprout
forth if they be nourished and cultivated. If our cathedral choirs
were the best in the old Catholic days, it is equally true, I
believe, that our orchestral associations are now the best in
Europe. So, at least, the German papers said on the occasion of the
recent visit of a north of England choir. But one cannot read Pepys
without knowing that the general musical habit is much less
cultivated now than of old.

V.

It is a long jump from Samuel Pepys to George Borrow--from one pole
of the human character to the other--and yet they are in contact on
the shelf of my favourite authors. There is something wonderful, I
think, about the land of Cornwall. That long peninsula extending out
into the ocean has caught all sorts of strange floating things, and
has held them there in isolation until they have woven themselves
into the texture of the Cornish race. What is this strange strain
which lurks down yonder and every now and then throws up a great
man with singular un-English ways and features for all the world to
marvel at? It is not Celtic, nor is it the dark old Iberian. Further
and deeper lie the springs. Is it not Semitic, Phoenician, the roving
men of Tyre, with noble Southern faces and Oriental imaginations,
who have in far-off days forgotten their blue Mediterranean and
settled on the granite shores of the Northern Sea?

Whence came the wonderful face and great personality of Henry
Irving? How strong, how beautiful, how un-Saxon it was! I only know
that his mother was a Cornish woman. Whence came the intense glowing
imagination of the Brontes--so unlike the Miss-Austen-like calm
of their predecessors? Again, I only know that their mother was a
Cornish woman. Whence came this huge elfin creature, George Borrow,
with his eagle head perched on his rocklike shoulders, brown-faced,
white-headed, a king among men? Where did he get that remarkable
face, those strange mental gifts, which place him by himself in
literature? Once more, his father was a Cornishman. Yes, there is
something strange, and weird, and great, lurking down yonder in the
great peninsula which juts into the western sea. Borrow may, if he
so pleases, call himself an East Anglian--"an English Englishman,"
as he loved to term it--but is it a coincidence that the one East
Anglian born of Cornish blood was the one who showed these strange
qualities? The birth was accidental. The qualities throw back to the
twilight of the world.

There are some authors from whom I shrink because they are so
voluminous that I feel that, do what I may, I can never hope to be
well read in their works. Therefore, and very weakly, I avoid them
altogether. There is Balzac, for example, with his hundred odd
volumes. I am told that some of them are masterpieces and the rest
pot-boilers, but that no one is agreed which is which. Such an
author makes an undue claim upon the little span of mortal years.
Because he asks too much one is inclined to give him nothing at all.
Dumas, too! I stand on the edge of him, and look at that huge crop,
and content myself with a sample here and there. But no one could
raise this objection to Borrow. A month's reading--even for a
leisurely reader--will master all that he has written. There are
"Lavengro," "The Bible in Spain," "Romany Rye," and, finally, if you
wish to go further, "Wild Wales." Only four books--not much to
found a great reputation upon--but, then, there are no other four
books quite like them in the language.

He was a very strange man, bigoted, prejudiced, obstinate, inclined
to be sulky, as wayward as a man could be. So far his catalogue of
qualities does not seem to pick him as a winner. But he had one
great and rare gift. He preserved through all his days a sense of
the great wonder and mystery of life--the child sense which is so
quickly dulled. Not only did he retain it himself, but he was
word-master enough to make other people hark back to it also. As he
writes you cannot help seeing through his eyes, and nothing which
his eyes saw or his ear heard was ever dull or commonplace. It was
all strange, mystic, with some deeper meaning struggling always to
the light. If he chronicled his conversation with a washer-woman
there was something arresting in the words he said, something
singular in her reply. If he met a man in a public-house one felt,
after reading his account, that one would wish to know more of
that man. If he approached a town he saw and made you see--not a
collection of commonplace houses or frowsy streets, but something
very strange and wonderful, the winding river, the noble bridge,
the old castle, the shadows of the dead. Every human being, every
object, was not so much a thing in itself, as a symbol and reminder
of the past. He looked through a man at that which the man
represented. Was his name Welsh? Then in an instant the individual
is forgotten and he is off, dragging you in his train, to ancient
Britons, intrusive Saxons, unheard-of bards, Owen Glendower,
mountain raiders and a thousand fascinating things. Or is it a
Danish name? He leaves the individual in all his modern commonplace
while he flies off to huge skulls at Hythe (in parenthesis I may
remark that I have examined the said skulls with some care, and they
seemed to me to be rather below the human average), to Vikings,
Berserkers, Varangians, Harald Haardraada, and the innate wickedness
of the Pope. To Borrow all roads lead to Rome.

But, my word, what English the fellow could write! What an
organ-roll he could get into his sentences! How nervous and vital
and vivid it all is!

There is music in every line of it if you have been blessed with an
ear for the music of prose. Take the chapter in "Lavengro" of how
the screaming horror came upon his spirit when he was encamped
in the Dingle. The man who wrote that has caught the true mantle
of Bunyan and Defoe. And, observe the art of it, under all the
simplicity--notice, for example, the curious weird effect produced
by the studied repetition of the word "dingle" coming ever round and
round like the master-note in a chime. Or take the passage about
Britain towards the end of "The Bible in Spain." I hate quoting from
these masterpieces, if only for the very selfish reason that my poor
setting cannot afford to show up brilliants. None the less, cost
what it may, let me transcribe that one noble piece of impassioned
prose--

"O England! long, long may it be ere the sun of thy glory sink
beneath the wave of darkness! Though gloomy and portentous
clouds are now gathering rapidly around thee, still, still
may it please the Almighty to disperse them, and to grant thee
a futurity longer in duration and still brighter in renown
than thy past! Or, if thy doom be at hand, may that doom be
a noble one, and worthy of her who has been styled the Old
Queen of the waters! May thou sink, if thou dost sink, amidst
blood and flame, with a mighty noise, causing more than one
nation to participate in thy downfall! Of all fates, may it
please the Lord to preserve thee from a disgraceful and a
slow decay; becoming, ere extinct, a scorn and a mockery for
those self-same foes who now, though they envy and abhor thee,
still fear thee, nay even against their will, honour and
respect thee.... Remove from thee the false prophets, who
have seen vanity and divined lies; who have daubed thy wall
with untempered mortar, that it may fall; who see visions
of peace where there is no peace; who have strengthened the
hands of the wicked, and made the heart of the righteous sad.
Oh, do this, and fear not the result, for either shall
thy end be a majestic and an enviable one; or God shall
perpetuate thy reign upon the waters, thou Old Queen!"

Or take the fight with the Flaming Tinman. It's too long for
quotation--but read it, read every word of it. Where in the language
can you find a stronger, more condensed and more restrained
narrative? I have seen with my own eyes many a noble fight, more
than one international battle, where the best of two great countries
have been pitted against each other--yet the second-hand impression
of Borrow's description leaves a more vivid remembrance upon my mind
than any of them. This is the real witchcraft of letters.

He was a great fighter himself. He has left a secure reputation in
other than literary circles--circles which would have been amazed to
learn that he was a writer of books. With his natural advantages,
his six foot three of height and his staglike agility, he could
hardly fail to be formidable. But he was a scientific sparrer as
well, though he had, I have been told, a curious sprawling fashion
of his own. And how his heart was in it--how he loved the fighting
men! You remember his thumb-nail sketches of his heroes. If you
don't I must quote one, and if you do you will be glad to read
it again--

"There's Cribb, the Champion of England, and perhaps the best
man in England; there he is, with his huge, massive figure,
and face wonderfully like that of a lion. There is Belcher,
the younger, not the mighty one, who is gone to his place,
but the Teucer Belcher, the most scientific pugilist that
ever entered a ring, only wanting strength to be I won't say
what. He appears to walk before me now, as he did that
evening, with his white hat, white great coat, thin genteel
figure, springy step, and keen determined eye. Crosses him,
what a contrast! Grim, savage Shelton, who has a civil word
for nobody, and a hard blow for anybody. Hard! One blow
given with the proper play of his athletic arm will unsense
a giant. Yonder individual, who strolls about with his hands
behind him, supporting his brown coat lappets, undersized,
and who looks anything but what he is, is the king of the
light-weights, so-called--Randall! The terrible Randall,
who has Irish blood in his veins; not the better for that,
nor the worse; and not far from him is his last antagonist,
Ned Turner, who, though beaten by him, still thinks himself
as good a man, in which he is, perhaps, right, for it was
a near thing. But how shall I name them all? They were
there by dozens, and all tremendous in their way. There
was Bulldog Hudson, and fearless Scroggins, who beat the
conqueror of Sam the Jew. There was Black Richmond--no,
he was not there, but I knew him well; he was the most
dangerous of blacks, even with a broken thigh. There was
Purcell, who could never conquer until all seemed over with
him. There was--what! shall I name thee last? Ay, why not?
I believe that thou art the last of all that strong family
still above the sod, where mayst thou long continue--true
piece of English stuff--Tom of Bedford. Hail to thee, Tom
of Bedford, or by whatever name it may please thee to be
called, Spring or Winter! Hail to thee, six-foot Englishman
of the brown eye, worthy to have carried a six-foot bow at
Flodden, where England's yeomen triumphed over Scotland's
King, his clans and chivalry. Hail to thee, last of English
bruisers, after all the many victories which thou hast
achieved--true English victories, unbought by yellow gold."

Those are words from the heart. Long may it be before we lose the
fighting blood which has come to us from of old! In a world of peace
we shall at last be able to root it from our natures. In a world
which is armed to the teeth it is the last and only guarantee of our
future. Neither our numbers, nor our wealth, nor the waters which
guard us can hold us safe if once the old iron passes from our
spirit. Barbarous, perhaps--but there are possibilities for
barbarism, and none in this wide world for effeminacy.

Borrow's views of literature and of literary men were curious.
Publisher and brother author, he hated them with a fine
comprehensive hatred. In all his books I cannot recall a word of
commendation to any living writer, nor has he posthumous praise for
those of the generation immediately preceding. Southey, indeed, he
commends with what most would regard as exaggerated warmth, but for
the rest he who lived when Dickens, Thackeray, and Tennyson were all
in their glorious prime, looks fixedly past them at some obscure
Dane or forgotten Welshman. The reason was, I expect, that his
proud soul was bitterly wounded by his own early failures and slow
recognition. He knew himself to be a chief in the clan, and when the
clan heeded him not he withdrew in haughty disdain. Look at his
proud, sensitive face and you hold the key to his life.

Harking back and talking of pugilism, I recall an incident which
gave me pleasure. A friend of mine read a pugilistic novel called
"Rodney Stone" to a famous Australian prize-fighter, stretched upon
a bed of mortal sickness. The dying gladiator listened with intent
interest but keen, professional criticism to the combats of the
novel. The reader had got to the point where the young amateur
fights the brutal Berks. Berks is winded, but holds his adversary
off with a stiff left arm. The amateur's second in the story, an old
prize-fighter, shouts some advice to him as to how to deal with the
situation. "That's right. By --- he's got him!" yelled the stricken
man in the bed. Who cares for critics after that?

You can see my own devotion to the ring in that trio of brown
volumes which stand, appropriately enough, upon the flank of Borrow.
They are the three volumes of "Pugilistica," given me years ago by
my old friend, Robert Barr, a mine in which you can never pick for
half an hour without striking it rich. Alas! for the horrible slang
of those days, the vapid witless Corinthian talk, with its ogles and
its fogles, its pointless jokes, its maddening habit of italicizing
a word or two in every sentence. Even these stern and desperate
encounters, fit sports for the men of Albuera and Waterloo, become
dull and vulgar, in that dreadful jargon. You have to tum to
Hazlitt's account of the encounter between the Gasman and the
Bristol Bull, to feel the savage strength of it all. It is a
hardened reader who does not wince even in print before that
frightful right-hander which felled the giant, and left him in "red
ruin" from eyebrow to jaw. But even if there be no Hazlitt present
to describe such a combat it is a poor imagination which is not
fired by the deeds of the humble heroes who lived once so vividly
upon earth, and now only appeal to faithful ones in these
little-read pages. They were picturesque creatures, men of great
force of character and will, who reached the limits of human bravery
and endurance. There is Jackson on the cover, gold upon brown,
"gentleman Jackson," Jackson of the balustrade calf and the noble
head, who wrote his name with an 88-pound weight dangling from his
little finger.

Here is a pen-portrait of him by one who knew him well--

"I can see him now as I saw him in '84 walking down Holborn
Hill, towards Smithfield. He had on a scarlet coat worked
in gold at the buttonholes, ruffles and frill of fine lace,
a small white stock, no collar (they were not then invented),
a looped hat with a broad black band, buff knee-breeches
and long silk strings, striped white silk stockings, pumps
and paste buckles; his waistcoat was pale blue satin,
sprigged with white. It was impossible to look on his fine
ample chest, his noble shoulders, his waist (if anything
too small), his large but not too large hips, his balustrade
calf and beautifully turned but not over delicate ankle,
his firm foot and peculiarly small hand, without thinking
that nature had sent him on earth as a model. On he went
at a good five miles and a half an hour, the envy of all
men and the admiration of all women."

Now, that is a discriminating portrait--a portrait which really
helps you to see that which the writer sets out to describe. After
reading it one can understand why even in reminiscent sporting
descriptions of those old days, amid all the Tonis and Bills
and Jacks, it is always Mr. John Jackson. He was the friend and
instructor of Byron and of half the bloods in town. Jackson it was
who, in the heat of combat, seized the Jew Mendoza by the hair,
and so ensured that the pugs for ever afterwards should be a
close-cropped race. Inside you see the square face of old Broughton,
the supreme fighting man of the eighteenth century, the man whose
humble ambition it was to begin with the pivot man of the Prussian
Guard, and work his way through the regiment. He had a chronicler,
the good Captain Godfrey, who has written some English which would
take some beating. How about this passage?--

"He stops as regularly as the swordsman, and carries his blows
truly in the line; he steps not back distrusting of himself,
to stop a blow, and puddle in the return, with an arm unaided
by his body, producing but fly-flap blows. No! Broughton steps
boldly and firmly in, bids a welcome to the coming blow;
receives it with his guardian arm; then, with a general
summons of his swelling muscles, and his firm body seconding
his arm, and supplying it with all its weight, pours the
pile-driving force upon his man."

One would like a little more from the gallant Captain. Poor
Broughton! He fough